PUBLIC SECTOR

FACIAL RECOGNITION USED BY SUPPORTING THE ELDERLY IN

THE POLICE JAPAN

Police in Oregon in the United States have started In the UK and Japan, AI is being tested to provide
to use facial recognition to detect criminals by support for the elderly in their homes by spotting
using Amazon’s tool, Rekognition. This was abnormal behaviours or patterns and alerting care
introduced in late 2017 and have accelerated givers or family members.
police investigations as it can scan through
thousands of images to find a match for one
photograph within seconds, allowing the police to
quickly find a person’s identity by linking it to their
name, family and address. However, defense
attorneys, artificial-intelligence researchers and civil
rights experts argue that the technology could lead
to the wrongful arrest of innocent people, which
have opened controversial discussions around
using this technology especially as it relates to the
threat of privacy and human rights. Hence why
the police are only using this tool to aid their
research and still manually review all matches after
it has gone through the tool.

It has also been used to identify dead bodies,

unconscious suspects and people who refuse to
give their name.

KEY WORDS
Facial Recognition- A technology that can identify a person from a digital image or video using features of the person’s face
and comparing it within a database.